Mr Masters took off his loafers, and tossed his dark blue blazer on the floor. His orange tie saturated against the cool white of his button up. He rolled his sleeves above his elbows, and stood with his legs apart and his hands together in front of him. "Whenever you're ready, Pat, I'll knock you on your ass."
Patrick grunted, walked forward and threw a simple straight jab.
Mr Masters caught Patrick's fist. "Really, that all you got?"
Patrick used his left hand to knock away Masters' arm and thrust his now free fist forward, before Masters moved his head to the left and quickly struck Patrick in the face in return. Two more strikes from Patrick, both blocked by Masters, his every punch seemed almost expected, blocked effortlessly by the man across from him. Masters pressed his student with a chop to the throat and two more strikes to the chest, sending Patrick stumbling backwards.
"I swear I taught you better than that." Masters said, pacing to the left, his posture still relaxed.
Patrick rushed forward and feinted a punch before crouching down and using his hand as a pivot point to deliver a kick, which landed squarely on Mr Masters forearm. Another blocked attack.
"Better. But if you want to land a hit, you're gonna have to do better than that"
They traded blows again before they both struck their fists downwards, clashing forearms. Suddenly, Mr Masters threw his weight forward and pushed off of his back foot, the shoulder check pushing Patrick backwards again.
Patrick moved in again, this time more aggressive. He threw strikes in rapid succession, each one blocked, until Masters blocked his attack with his arm again and grabbed his wrist. Patrick saw his opening, his free hand rushed upwards from below, finding its way through the guard and landing an uppercut. Mr Masters lost his grip on his arm, and Patrick followed up with an elbow to Mr Masters jaw. Patrick jumped and curled his body inwards, and stretched his leg above his head, attempting a jumping ax kick.
"Too cocky. That was a textbook kick, Parkley, my textbook, to be exact. Try not to hit me with my own moves." Mr Masters said, bringing his knee up and instantly sending Patrick crashing to the ground with a strong kick to the stomach.
While reeling from the pain, a soft tone played in Patrick's earpiece, his phone was ringing. trying to hide the sting of frustration creeping up on him he tapped the earpiece and said, strained, "You've got Park, who is this?" Hand on his abdomen, he made it to his feet.
"It's Sword, babe. Caller ID, much?" A woman's voice sounded from the other end of the line. Her voice was smooth and playful. "Got a job that sounds just perfect for a sneaky little so-and-so like you."
"Taking a call in the middle of our fight, terrible sparring etiquette. Who teaches you kids anything anymore?" Mr. Masters said, rolling his sleeves down.
"Shattered. Don't tell me you're missing me already?" He said, sitting on the vinyl cushioned bench. He leaned against the cool wall behind him. "What's the job?"
"You know the drill. Get to the bar and I'll give you the dossier, yeah? Thought you'd know by now that's where all the good jobs start."
"You know there are easier ways to tell me you just want to see my pretty face." He caught the towel that Masters tossed towards him. He swabbed at his neck and back before tossing it on the floor.
Mr. Masters looked at him with eyes wide with annoyance. "Manners." He said, gesturing towards the towel, but Patrick didn't see as he was already out the door.
As Parkley left Taskmaster's private sparring room, he stepped into the larger training floor of the dojo, a sprawling space where new recruits were paired off, trading blows under Taskmaster's unforgiving standards. The air was thick with the sounds of clashing fists, grunts, and the steady beat of a speed bag in the corner.
Rows of trainees, mercenaries-in-the-making, stood in stark contrast to Parkley; they all wore simple tactical bodysuits with Mr Masters' symbol, a dark blue circular shield with a stylized orange letter "T" in the center of it. Parkley moved through them, weaving past two rookies locked in a fierce, if unbalanced, grapple. Their footwork was all wrong, but they scrapped with determination.
He glanced at a nearby pair sparring in the middle of the room. The taller one lunged forward with a heavy swing, missing his opponent by a good foot. Parkley winced as the shorter one scrambled out of the way, his wide eyes fixed in a mix of fear and focus. Neither would last ten seconds against Taskmaster.
A few trainees cast curious glances his way, their eyes lingering on his streamlined suit and the subtle swagger in his step. Parkley wasn't one of them; he had the confidence of a seasoned fighter, a veteran who had survived these training grounds. One of the wide-eyed recruits, a lanky man with a mess of dark hair, immediately straightened his stance, nearly stumbling over his own feet.
"Keep your balance, kid," Parkley said with a chuckle. "Trust me—Taskmaster won't give you any second chances for tripping."
Parkley continued through the room, sidestepping another brawl that nearly spilled into his path, two fighters thrashing with reckless abandon. Taskmaster's voice echoed in his head, a reminder from his own early days: *Control the fight, don't let it control you.
As he reached the door, Parkley cast one last look over the room. It was a place of raw potential, a training ground where hesitation was stamped out and skill, no matter how modest, was honed to lethal perfection. Every fighter here had a glimmer of something that brought them to Taskmaster's employ.
With one final nod to the room, Parkley pushed open the heavy metal door, stepping into the underground garage. It was a dimly lit place, a low hum echoing off the concrete walls as armored vehicles carrying squads of Tasmasters soldiers drove in and out.
Parkley navigated his way to a sleek black car tucked in the shadows. He slipped into the driver's seat, the engine purring to life with a growl. Ahead, a narrow tunnel led deeper underground, its jagged walls flickering under yellow lights. The tunnel twisted and curved, graffiti tagging the concrete in sharp neon colors here and there. Finally, The road ramped upwards onto the regular street. Patrick sped up, the car taking off into the air off of the ramp, landing on the road in between other civilian cars. The wheels skidded, leaving marks on the road and the car swerved back and forth before he managed to get it straight.
After another short drive, he pulled into a small parking lot in an alley. He craned his head forward and looked at the sign, neon lights that took the shape of a window being shattered into jagged glass.
The Shattered Lounge, a bar meant for mercenaries looking for jobs, or brokers, run by an alien mercenary, the Shattered Sword herself.
He slipped on his Stinger Gauntlets and headed inside. Once in the door the sound of classic rock was muffled by the conversations of other mercenaries and superpowered criminals. He made his way through the bar, past the pool tables where he recognized the shining red leather jacket of Iron Star, one of the Avengers. After a few moments of contemplation he decided not to say anything. After all, if Sword let him in then he belongs here.
He reached his hand out to open a door labeled Owner's Office in old bronze lettering. As he did so a man in a silver-blue blazer and short white hair rushed through the door, bumping into Patrick's shoulder. A strange vibration seemed to run through his body and as a result his muscles started to ache.
"Say 'Hello' to your sister for me, I'm sure she misses me!" Shattered Sword called from behind her desk.
"So who's the hair gel?" Parkley said, the door slowly swinging closed behind him.
"Brother of an ex-girlfriend. No one you should worry your pretty little head about." She took a folder out of a drawer and placed it on the desk. "Here's the job, and the twenty-thousand advance. Don't disappoint me."
"Please, when's the last time I failed a job?" He opened the folder and looked inside, quickly counting the cash.
"First time for everything."
"You're letting the Avengers in here now? Didn't think Iron Star needed the money."
"Don't think so hard, cutie, you'll hurt yourself. His heart is as black as yours and mine. And he also makes a lot of arms deals with my regulars. He might be an Avenger, but that doesn't mean he's a hero, and it's just him allowed in."
"Repulsor tech on the streets, that's bound to cause problems. Big PR disaster. Anyway, what's my timeline?"
"One week starting," she looked at her wrist, feigning looking at a watch, "Yesterday. Better work fast, the client is really antsy about getting this done. "
Patrick grunted quietly and left the office and headed home to research the target.
Midnight pressed heavy and silent around the Oscorp skyscraper, an empire of glass and steel piercing the sky. Patrick Parkley, clad in a matte black stealth suit that hugged his frame like a second skin, crouched low in the shadows on a roof across the Oscorp Laboratories skyscraper. He looked through his binoculars.
All the company internal blueprints I could find said that the R floors are from 25-35. Definitely narrows it down, but not as much as I'd like. He thought.
He scanned the outside wall of the building, and on the outside of the 20th floor or so he saw a security box.
Bingo. Now let's go make some friends. He thought.
He moved to a tripod with a mounted gun on it and under the noise of a passing helicopter he fired it. A long slender harpoon flew across from his building, far above the bustling streets, and just before impact, the end split into three clawed prongs that stuck nicely to the sheer wall of the Oscorp building. He flicked a switch on the tripod, which released powerful claws out from the feet. They dug into the concrete roof, providing ample strength.
Patrick clipped his harness onto the thick cord, and began climbing across on the underside of the crossing, his motions fluid and silent. The quiet night air grew louder and louder as Patrick noticed the helicopter coming back towards him. Knowing that it would either see, or worse, collide, with the cable he pulled the knife from the back of his hip and sawed through the cable.
The threads snapped and Patrick was sent swinging towards the Oscorp building
This is going to hurt, he thought.
He slammed into the concrete wall with his shoulder, he grit his teeth and grunted at the pain under his mask. Holding onto the now cut cable he felt it start to lower under his weight. Patrick quickly tapped on the symbols on his gauntlets, activating his magnetized gloves and boots, connecting its charge to the rebar inside the foundation.
Patrick crawled along the outside of the building towards the exposed security box. When he reached it, he connected the datapad on his gauntlets to it and hacked into the security subsystems.
Making his way over to a window above the lobby he watched as the scientists and other employees moved about the end of their day. Quickly turning off the security alarm, he cut a small opening in the window. Just small enough that he could slip through.
Once inside the building, he held tightly onto the window panel. It was a slow process making it over to the elevator. Once there he waited for it to stop on a glass walkway, he slipped inside the shaft, a pillar of metal, of wires, and of concrete. He opened the top of the elevator and pressed the button labeled 30.
After the elevator rode up several floors it stopped.
Not really part of my plan, he thought.
Two women stepped onto the elevator. One with messy dark red hair and glasses, and the other with long straight black hair. They both wore normal clothes underneath lab coats, pinned with visitor passes.
"I cant believe your dad is going to let us see his lab here!" The Red-Haired woman said excitedly, "The advancements in genetic modification technology are groundbreaking!"
"Well, he's been weirdly obsessed with these spiders lately. Supposedly it's something to do with a plan my father made a long time ago.
"I can see why, spiders can be amazing creatures. If we could harness silk production on the level of the size of humans, it'd be an amazing material. Though I've also heard of people isolating certain chemical compounds in the silk sacs of spiders. Either way, it's the beginning of a new era."
"You sound like him, y'know. He's been trying to convince me to join his research team for years. Says the next generation needs to take the reins of research."
With your brains and his experience, you'd revolutionize the field. But what's holding you back?"
She sighed. "I just don't want to end up with a career based on my uncle's expectations. I have to find my own path."
The elevator slowed and opened into a sleek office space, with a glass door next to a very high tech looking desk. A man at the desk turned around, as the two women stepped out of the elevator. He was an average looking man, with some gray streaks in his otherwise brown hair.
He hugged Jesse. "Welcome, girls. Ah, how are you today Jesse, how is Dempsey? And you are…"
"Mary-Anne." Jesse said.
"Mary-Anne! Yes, of course. Come along, we don't have a lot of time today."
Arachnid looked around the elevator shaft and found an opening to the ventilation system for this floor. He quietly pulled the grate off and entered the vent. He crawled through with his elbows and knees, keeping his body flat. Only the soft, ambient blue glow from his wrist pad cut through the shadows.
Well this isn't very secure. This vent is far bigger than it should be. Guess I can't complain too much. He thought.
As he shuffled through the vents above, he could hear bits and pieces of the conversation that the scientist and the women were having. He overheard the name Konnors, as the scientist remarked how helpful the junior scientist was on the project.
As the three reached a passcode door, Patrick climbed right over and dropped through a grate in the ceiling. He landed softly on the concrete floor of the lab just as the door opened. He ducked behind one of the desks melting into the shadows.
"Here we are, the culmination of years of my research and practical application theorem, several batches of spiders with a special injectable strain of G-atC in place of their venom." He gestured to long rows of thin clear habitats, filled with spiders of various sizes and colors, lining a stack of walls in the center of the room. Their tiny forms glinted under the soft blue glow of containment units.
"Which is meant to do what?" Mary-Anne turned to ask.
"Anything we program the G-atC to do, practically we can input the code to cure genetic diseases, increase muscle gain, manufacture the change of hair or eye color, even cause chemical manufacture inside the body."
"Dr Wynholm, that's amazing, that could really change the world for the better!" She said, tracing her finger on the glass of the units.
"More likely to make the rich richer," Jesse nudged Mary-Anne with her elbow, while holding the strap on her shoulder bag. "You really think Oscorp is going to let this technology roam free?"
"Oscorp is nothing but a stepping stone for me." He leaned forward and pressed his hands to the glass of the containment units. "Harold and the stockholders' money fund my vision. On paper, I may be their model employee, their Master's degree scientist in a lab coat, but every project, every experiment brings me closer to my penultimate goal. Just think, imagine it: a world where every man, woman, and child is elevated beyond natural evolution, the powers denied to many of us now coursing through the very fabric of humanity. Superiority would be but a thing of the past, we would all finally be on equal footing. Mutants, mutates, aliens, even gods would be subject to my Genetic Alteration Code! A utopia will come after the initial chaos and I will be hailed as a great genius, the very embodiment of progress, a veritable god among mortals!"
Get a load of Dr. God Complex, Patrick thought.
Realizing what he had just said, and bringing his hands down from being up in the air. "Apologies. I got a mite carried away. Too many superhero movies and sleepless nights, I suppose."
Mary-Anne giggled. "This spider is waving at me." She wiggled her finger back at it. "Hi, little buddy."
Jesse rolled her eyes.
A trio of Oscorp security guards and a man in a lab coat entered the room.
"Dr. Wynholm. Management has asked us to inform you that the visitor hours have expired, and your guests must leave now." Labcoat said, matter of factly.
"Alright, girls. Time to go. I'd like to tell you more about how the G-atC works, but it's proprietary information that belongs to Oscorp." He said, leading Mary-Anne away from the cases.
The lab emptied out, until Patrick was left, still ducked behind the table. The pneumatic doors hissed shut, sealing the room.
"Showtime." Patrick quietly said to himself. He unfurled a small satchel and buckled it to his belt and harnesses. He took two reinforced canisters marked with digital trackers out of their slots and stashed them in his satchel, which he closed and secured tightly.
The lights in the room suddenly flicked on and in an ominous deep red flooding the lab in harsh color. And an alarm began to blare around the room.
"The assets must've been connected to their own closed system, I should've known." He said to himself.
The door quickly hissed open and five guards rushed into the room. Upon seeing the man in a black tactical suit, the Oscorp PMCs opened fire. The ceramic ballistics crashing through the glass cases of spiders, releasing them into the room.
Patrick ducked and weaved around, jumping around and behind different desks, while the computers and glass beakers around the room exploded from the hail of gunfire.
Patrick gripped the handlebar that flipped out from his gauntlets. He rolled out from behind a desk riddled with holes on one side and quickly pressed on the handle which fired several small projectiles at the Oscorp PMCs, it hit them in the neck and electricity coursed through their bodies and they dropped to the floor, unconscious.
As the two remaining PMCs looked down at the others, Patrick rushed forward and brought a fist down on a button with the label "Decontaminate" above it.
The sprinkler system in the roof began to spray down thick clouds of chemical disinfectant into the room. As Patrick slipped past the PMCs, and into the elevator shaft. He planned to fall at least a few floors, but soon landed on top of an elevator coming up.
The doors of the elevator dinged and Dr Wynholm ran out, "No! No, the spiders are too important, what have you done you gun-toting brutes. You've destroyed all of my research!"
Patrick didn't stay behind for long, he clipped a carabiner onto the cable that held the elevator and climbed up as far as he could go. Simultaneously he was listening in on the security radios. He reached what looked like the office of someone important. Quietly he opened the door, the electronic loc already disengaged.
The walls were covered in very expensive looking wooden planks and the floor was entirely carpet, unlike any of the rest of the building. The office exuded the wealth and influence of a man who relished his own power. Modern art pieces lined the walls, and rare, exotic plants sat in hydroponic units. Parkley ignored the decor, his focus on the massive desk and the computer screen glowing atop it.
He moved to the computer on a desk facing the door. He unpaired the datapad from the security systems, and instead connected it to the computer. He downloaded all the data he could access, having it all in a separate folder named "Oscorp Data."
He unlocked one of the floor to ceiling windows, and connected the nylon under his arms and between his legs before leaping out of the window and gliding away from the Oscorp building. The city sprawled beneath him, the lights like stars against the dark streets as he glided to a nearby rooftop. Tucking away the glider wings, and pacing his gear he broke into a run, leaping from building to building, each jump carefully calculated. His pulse raced, but his every step was sure and steady as he darted across the skyline, a ghost in the night on his way to a safehouse.
An unassuming building tucked behind an industrial warehouse, its windows dark and covered in layers of dust. He moved through the front door with a low creak, finding the place exactly as Taskmaster had promised: barely furnished, just a cot, a small table, and the soft whir of the outdated ceiling fan.
As he pulled off his mask, something small and sharp poked his neck. Instinctively, he slapped a hand to the spot, squashing a small black spider with orange legs that had apparently hitchhiked out of Oscorp's lab. Patrick raised his hand, staring at the squashed remains with a wince and muttered, "Two canisters minus one." He tossed his mask onto the table, rolling his eyes, but an odd sensation prickled at the back of his mind. Shaking it off, he lay down on the cot, and drifted into a restless sleep.
The night was thick with odd dreams. Visions of crawling, skittering shadows, webs stretching infinitely before him. Suddenly he found himself in an expanse of webs. A mysterious being with a metal mask engraved to look like the face of a slider turned to look at him.
"Another spider joins the web." It said, echoing in a legion of voices. It held out it's clawed hand, a web stretching out from Patrick's bare chest that the being connected to a device in front of it.
When he woke, sweat slicked his skin, his breathing heavy and labored. He chalked it up to nerves, maybe a result of the genetically enhanced spider bite. But the mission wasn't over yet, and he had a job to finish.
Putting his mask back on, he took the spider canisters and made his way through the dim streets to the dead-drop point in an abandoned alley. He left the package behind a loose brick, then climbed up into the shadows while he waited. Minutes passed, and eventually, a figure cloaked in a trenchcoat slipped from around the corner, sweeping the area with caution before collecting the canisters and slipping back into the bustle of New York streets.
Days later, the call from Shattered Sword came through. Patrick made his way to the Shattered Lounge to collect the second half of his payment, but something was… off. As he reached for the handle, his fingers seemed to stick, clinging to the metal surface even when he tried to pull them away. He pried his hand free, staring at his fingers with a raised eyebrow.
Inside, he tried to play it off, but the feeling only got stranger. His boots seemed to cling to the floor just slightly, as if every step resisted him, like stepping in syrup. He forced himself to stay calm as Shattered Sword approached him, a sly smile on her face as she handed over the money.
"Knew you'd get it done, Parkley," she said with a smirk. "Everything go off without a hitch?"
"Simple enough," he replied, his voice steady despite the sensations crawling up his arms and the odd weight of his teeth. He pocketed the envelope of cash and left quickly, trying to ignore the tingling in his fingers and the stickiness clinging to his skin.
Back in his safehouse, Patrick stood before the mirror, pulling back his lips to examine his teeth. The canines were undeniably sharper now, almost fanged, and he noticed that when he tensed, they pointed forward ever so slightly, like mandibles. Testing his fingers on the wall, he found they adhered like suction cups, sticking to the surface with an unnatural grip. He pulled back, staring at his hands with a mixture of disbelief and thrill. Something had changed inside him.
A grin spread across his face as he flexed his fingers, feeling the potential crackling through him. Whatever the spider bite had done, it was time to test the limits of these new abilities.